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I am really far from any borders (smack middle of the country) and I'd have to check if customs won't detain something sent from another country, but stuff from Brazil might get across the border thanks to economic treaties. Gonna check those links, thanks.
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Jul 20, 2015 01:55
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With the Fields of Arle talk I was wondering from those who have played it how much variability there is from game to game. Are there randomized elements at setup? Are there enough different strategies and things to do that it would still feel interesting and different after 5+ plays?
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Jul 20, 2015 02:10
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Azran posted:I am really far from any borders (smack middle of the country) and I'd have to check if customs won't detain something sent from another country, but stuff from Brazil might get across the border thanks to economic treaties. I can't understand the moon speak, but when I google 'thebookdepository argentina' I see lots of  so hopefully you too can enjoy rampant consumerism along with the rest of us!! 
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Jul 20, 2015 02:33
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EBag posted:With the Fields of Arle talk I was wondering from those who have played it how much variability there is from game to game. Are there randomized elements at setup? Are there enough different strategies and things to do that it would still feel interesting and different after 5+ plays? Of the available buildings, 9 are fixed for use in every game, and 9 are randomly chosen at the beginning of every game. Each rewards a different emphasis on various parts of your farm.
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Jul 20, 2015 04:53
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Achmed Jones posted:Has anyone played the Temple of Elemental Evil board game? We found it quite hard, and this is after getting pretty good at Wrath of Ashardalon and Legend of Drizzt. As you progress through the game certain cards are added to the decks while your characters gain items, levels and permenant daily-esque tokens that give various advantages. If you didn't take all the difficult-level cards out of the encounter deck and monster deck, and your characters haven't had a chance to git gud, that may be why.
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Jul 20, 2015 05:19
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I like to play the Mage Knight tutorial, but when the city is revealed I ask the newbie whether she wants end it now or if she'd like the conquer that bitch. Usually, people are into conquering it, and it makes for a slightly better ending. Speaking of Mage Knight, has anyone heard anything about the new expansion?
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Jul 20, 2015 07:50
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BonHair posted:I like to play the Mage Knight tutorial, but when the city is revealed I ask the newbie whether she wants end it now or if she'd like the conquer that bitch. Usually, people are into conquering it, and it makes for a slightly better ending. This is what I do. Just keep on playing the tutorial mission instead of ending it as soon as the city is found, which is just when things are getting good. Last I heard the expansion was going to be released "late July". Wizkids has always been notoriously vague with release dates.
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Jul 20, 2015 09:37
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Thanks for the Mage Knight answers. By the time we started playing, the only answers were don't skip the tutorial, so we didn't. This is the fourth time I've done the tutorial and I've never played a non-tutorial game, but you're right that it's about getting people into it slowly. It was hard enough explaining things anyway, so tutorial was probably for the best. But I think the additions by others is right. The problem with each tutorial I play is the city is found just as the decks are getting exciting and the chance to fight big monsters comes about. It makes it a bit anti-climactic. The last two games including the one just played, we just played to the end of the day, mopping up spare dungeons, keeps and mage towers. I have never assaulted a city, I should read up how. I like the idea that the tutorial should be blitz Co-op with the original tutorial tiles. It gives a proper end game goal. Buy hopefully I won't be needing to teach tutorials again. One player last night declared it instantly their new favourite game, and the time before I played with my brother who went from slightly sneering at it to drawing the curtains during the night phase!
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Jul 20, 2015 10:18
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Fat Turkey posted:I have never assaulted a city, I should read up how. Fundamentally:
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Jul 20, 2015 11:20
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Can you travel across a border and get a big haul of games? I don't suppose you are near Brazil? There seems to be some brazilians on bgg that order games from thebookdepository marked as gifts https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/71514/buying-board-games-bookdepositorycom/page/2?titlesonly=1 I'm in Brazil and literally writing an email right now about 6 packages from Book Depository that have disappeared since ordering early this year (bunch of x wings ordered separately and game of thrones board game). People have said it's a lottery but 0 from 6? Followed up with Post office and the Import office and without a tracking number they both say there's literally nothing I can do but wait. I suspect there's some rear end in a top hat(s) just ripping off untracked packages and selling them on because all the books (in English) I order make it through. (books are untaxed so the rear end in a top hat is probably a customs guy) Tldr: games are still expensive as gently caress in Brazil too don't bother. Rely on the friend bringing it from the US like all other south americans. hoiyes fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Jul 20, 2015 |
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Jul 20, 2015 12:18
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hoiyes posted:I'm in Brazil and literally writing an email right now about 6 packages from Book Depository that have disappeared since ordering early this year (bunch of x wings ordered separately and game of thrones board game). People have said it's a lottery but 0 from 6? Followed up with Post office and the Import office and without a tracking number they both say there's literally nothing I can do but wait. I suspect there's some rear end in a top hat(s) just ripping off untracked packages and selling them on because all the books (in English) I order make it through. (books are untaxed so the rear end in a top hat is probably a customs guy) Man that's rough  . I don't buy games often but it is really nice to get them when I do order them.
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Jul 20, 2015 13:01
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As someone who does import/export all over the place. Brazil is the most difficult by far. Getting goods into the poorest nations is easier than navigating through Brazil customs.
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Jul 20, 2015 15:55
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hoiyes posted:Tldr: games are still expensive as gently caress in Brazil too don't bother. Rely on the friend bringing it from the US like all other south americans. My vacation is coming up. If some of you guys want to buy me a plane ticket I'll fill a suitcase full of whatever games you want and come on down for a visit. Going to Gencon first, so if you want me to pick up some games there too, just let me know. 
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Jul 20, 2015 16:05
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One more interesting thing about Baseball Highlights 2045, it has two resources but the deck-building and scoring parts of the game are separate. You recruit players, play a series, and recruits some more, play a series, and so on. The cards have both an in-game value and a recruitment value, with some cards being worth more for recruiting but less effective in the actual games and vice versa. It would be interesting to see this approach taken with a game that has more of a traditional MtG tableau building and game transforming card powers. It would take significantly longer, though. It would also be interesting if the more common dual resource deck builders like Legendary took a phased approach like this, with all cards having a recruitment and encounter strength and some being more effective in one phase vs another (maybe even similar to Mage Knight's side flipping of cards).
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Jul 20, 2015 18:07
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fozzy fosbourne posted:One more interesting thing about Baseball Highlights 2045, it has two resources but the deck-building and scoring parts of the game are separate. You recruit players, play a series, and recruits some more, play a series, and so on. The cards have both an in-game value and a recruitment value, with some cards being worth more for recruiting but less effective in the actual games and vice versa. That actually sounds a lot like what Millennium Blades is doing. You have one round that is all about buying and selling and collating cards, then a tournament round where you use the deck you built and score based on that (synergy between types, bonus points for gimmick cards, that sort of thing) and your collections of various types of cards.
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Jul 20, 2015 18:25
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Going on holiday with my girlfriend and I'd like to bring a 2 player game, preferably card based. She likes the Catan cardgame loads, and Machi Koro. I'd love to play a deckbuilder with her but she's kind of turned off by Magic and the like. She also loved Dominion. Does anyone have any suggestions?
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Jul 20, 2015 20:48
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Commissar Kip posted:Going on holiday with my girlfriend and I'd like to bring a 2 player game, preferably card based. Hanabi might be a good one to consider.
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Jul 20, 2015 20:51
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Commissar Kip posted:Going on holiday with my girlfriend and I'd like to bring a 2 player game, preferably card based. You say you want to play a deckbuilder so why not just play Dominion?
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Jul 20, 2015 20:54
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Based on the mention of Magic I think he's using "deckbuilder" to refer to deck construction.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:07
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Commissar Kip posted:Going on holiday with my girlfriend and I'd like to bring a 2 player game, preferably card based. I've greatly enjoyed Patchwork and Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small as decent two player games, they take about half an hour to play. Valley of the Kings is a pretty good two player deckbuilder with a very quick setup time.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:08
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Scyther posted:Based on the mention of Magic I think he's using "deckbuilder" to refer to deck construction. 
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Jul 20, 2015 21:13
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Other than that they use cards, Magic and Dominion are very much not alike.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:14
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FISHMANPET posted:Other than that they use cards, Magic and Dominion are very much not alike. 
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Jul 20, 2015 21:18
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Commissar Kip posted:Going on holiday with my girlfriend and I'd like to bring a 2 player game, preferably card based. Not a card game, but Hive has a small footprint (suitcaseprint?), is super sturdy and is worth a good number of plays before burning out.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:18
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FISHMANPET posted:Other than that they use cards, Magic and Dominion are very much not alike. To him they are.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:19
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Commissar Kip posted:Going on holiday with my girlfriend and I'd like to bring a 2 player game, preferably card based. Jaipur is a neat little 2-player card game that fits into a neat little box. Carcassonne is also easier to shrink down into a smaller box and is good for two.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:21
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Zveroboy posted:Jaipur is a neat little 2-player card game that fits into a neat little box. Carcassonne is also easier to shrink down into a smaller box and is good for two. These two. Also, deck building games are where you build your deck while playing (Dominion). Deck construction are games where you build a deck before playing (MtG).
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Jul 20, 2015 22:01
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Commissar Kip posted:Going on holiday with my girlfriend and I'd like to bring a 2 player game, preferably card based. As mentioned Jaipur is awesome. San Juan is also great and can fit in a smaller box, play it with my GF all the time.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:22
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Didn't get to play on Thursday, but I got to play Dark Moon yesterday with my D&D group and some other folks. We did two rounds of 7 player. I'm very impressed with it. This is going to be long, since I quite enjoyed myself and how the game works is really cool as a design iteration on Battlestar Galactica. It also takes 60-90 minutes, which is a drat far sight from BSG's evening devouring playtime. Theme and Game  The theme is pretty cool if you're into sci-fi. It's half Alien, half The Thing. You're the crew of a mining outpost on Titan and some of the crew has become infected with an alien parasite. You have to survive (in the form of clearing events) until you can be rescued. The infected, however, want to destroy the station and murder you dead. It's a hidden-role, action-taking, bluffing and deduction game, to sum it up in a short, pithy way. Everyone has a character with a special ability (all very useful) and a status card telling them if they are Infected or not, much like the characters and loyalty cards in BSG. You also have a Commander card that can move around the table and that person picks the events when needed and breaks all voting ties. Actions  Where Dark Moon really shines compared to BSG is how everyone is able to try any action, but some players are markedly more suited to it. You never have to wait around for someone with a Repair card or groan when all the people who draw Leadership (for XOs) reveal as Cylons. The main actions are pretty simple, you can repair the shields/outpost/life support, issue an order to give someone two actions or some dice (more on the dice later), go Lone Wolf to try to clear the current event, or you can call a vote to quarantine someone. You won't always have access to these options, since damage to the outpost takes those off the table. You can't vote if the research lab is damaged, you can't repair the shields if the shield controls are damaged, and so on for all 6 actions. Dice  Now onto the dice (horror of horrors, I know). The dice mechanic in this is really cool and is a really solid iteration on the various skill decks from BSG. There's two kinds of dice, weak (red) and strong (black). Important note on the dice that drives the whole game: they are 2/3 negative. All dice have -2/-2/-2/-1 faces. Strong dice have +2/+4 and weak dice have +1/+3 on the remaining faces. There's also a Commander die available to the commander (naturally) with +3/+5 sides. Dice are rolled secretly, then submitted (usually one or maybe two at a time) publicly. Actions tend to limit you to the three dice rolled. A positive submitted die will succeed at a repair, but you need to submit a pair of positives to successfully Lone Wolf and help move the event forward. You submit them for repair actions and for Malfuctions and they also are used for voting. You start the game with a limit of four dice and two of each color. Since you submit and recover dice so frequently, the amount of each type you have will fluctuate throughout the game. Tasks and Events will also modify your maximum dice pool. You see where the opportunities for sabotage and twists of fate come in. Lies of "Yeah, this is the best I rolled, sorry guys" ad nauseum, people in bad situations just rolling utter garbage and getting Quarantined, a revealed infected adding +4 to the check they tried to tank, that sort of thing. It's really cool and you get the experience of a BSG skill check in half the time and effort. Events and Tasks  Proceeding through the game requires the completion of 4 events. 3 chosen by the commander and a Final Event chosen at the beginning of the game. At the start of the game and whenever an event completes, the Commander picks a new event and puts it on the board. To clear an event, you have to succeed at Tasks drawn at the end of each player's turn or Lone Wolf and submit two positive dice. Each success puts a cube on the event and when the event's slots are filled up, it is completed. The Task deck that works a lot like the BSG crisis deck. At the end of a player's turn, they draw two Tasks and choose one to complete. You have Malfunctions that work like skill checks and Complications that are decisions to be made. Malfunctions are the main way dice are used, in my estimation. In a Malfunction, everyone, starting with the current player, says if they're in or out. If you're out, you recover two dice. Then, each player who is in, in order, rolls all of their dice and submits one or more to the check. If you roll dice, you have to submit at least one. You can then opt to roll your remaining dice and submit another one, but positive results get harder and harder to achieve with fewer dice, since they're already 50% negative. Once everyone's had a chance, you tally it up and the Malfunction passes or fails. If a Malfunction task fails, the relevant system takes damage. Shields can cause further damage, outpost damage removes action options, and life support fatigues characters so they can't use their special ability. If it succeeds, you put a cube on the event. If this completes it, you draw the new event immediately. Complications are much less work, usually someone just has to make a decision and the task succeeds or fails accordingly. A success adds a cube to the event, as with Malfunctions. Infected and Voting  Now onto the Infected. There's a known quantity of infected in each round. Unlike BSG, there's no sleeper phase, so trust is gained and lost once without a reset halfway through. Being Infected isn't much like being a Cylon, though. Whereas BSG is long enough and the Cylon options strong enough to reveal early and wreak havoc, Dark Moon requires more subtlety. Infected need to figure out when the non-infected are weak and strike. Being quarantined or revealing cuts your dice pool and options dramatically. You no longer draw Tasks to mess things up, you generally just try to mess with people, trading dice or testing shields once you reveal. It's better to just keep your cover until your chance to win arises. Votes to quarantine are pretty cool. The dice colors matter here. Someone can call for a vote on someone as an action or the various tasks can build up a Suspicious Activity track that eventually forces a vote. Everyone puts a die in their fist to vote, or no dice to abstain. A red die is a vote to quarantine that player and a black die is the opposite. Majority rules, ties broken by the commander. In quarantine your die pool is reduced by two and you can't attempt repair actions or lone wolf. Overall Impressions  As has been mentioned before, this is an iteration on an older print and play game called BSG Express. The idea is to take all of the paranoia and trust exercises required to win a game of Battlestar Galactica and strip out all of the mechanical fiddlyness that makes BSG take 4+ hours to actually play. The game is clearly designed for people that know BSG, but it was pretty friendly to newbies. I, personally, appreciated how the design managed to take the systems from BSG and iterate and substitute to keep the same feel. I think Dark Moon is a really fantastic traitor game. It cuts out a LOT of the cruft that makes BSG frustrating and the dice mechanics lead to some very tense moments where you have to figure out if a player is intentionally tanking repairs or it just rolling terribly. The game proceeds smoothly, we never lost track of whose turn it was, and it was a tense, distrustful bit of chaos until the bitter end. We played two games with two very different Infected victories. One ended at about the halfway mark with a Malfunction being tanked and destroying the station. The second was a longer, more brutal fight, ending on the last cube of the Final Event. TL;DR  If you like BSG or you like more involved traitor games, you'll almost certainly like Dark Moon. We played with some newbies and some BSG players of varying experience and everyone enjoyed it. I am really glad this is in my collection. Echophonic fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jul 20, 2015 |
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Jul 20, 2015 22:29
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Echophonic posted:
My groups loves BSG and other hidden role games, this sounds great. I will definitely have to check it out.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:42
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Echophonic posted:Dark Moon Oh no. It sounds like I am going to have to increase my GenCon budget... I liked BSG, but the length and fiddliness made get rid of it. This sounds right up my alley.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:44
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Echophonic posted:TL;DR I know a lot of people in my group would be really interested in this. Thanks for the writeup.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:57
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How big would be a good board game table? I'm buying a home and I want to make sure I can put a decent size table in the kitchen for gaming.
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Jul 20, 2015 23:07
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My LGS has (had, bought it) Ra for $20, and Through the Desert for $70. Weird as heck just thought I'd share folks.
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Jul 20, 2015 23:19
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How many players max? Any kind of sweet spot of players to shoot for? I usually have a smaller group bit i know they would love this kind of thing. No experience with BSG at all though so this'll be all our first times playing something like that.
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Jul 20, 2015 23:23
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HOOLY BOOLY posted:How many players max? Any kind of sweet spot of players to shoot for? I usually have a smaller group bit i know they would love this kind of thing. No experience with BSG at all though so this'll be all our first times playing something like that. Does 3 to 7, with different task decks for odd and even player counts to balance the ratio of infected being lower on the even counts. I've only done two games at 7 players, so not totally sure about lower counts. Looking at the even player count setups, I could see it playing very similarly, even though the numbers are against the Infected. The Malfunctions are a lot harder to clear on the even side. The odd deck tops out at 8 for odd counts and 10(!) for the even deck.
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Jul 20, 2015 23:32
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Echophonic posted:Does 3 to 7, with different task decks for odd and even player counts to balance the ratio of infected being lower on the even counts. I've only done two games at 7 players, so not totally sure about lower counts. Looking at the even player count setups, I could see it playing very similarly, even though the numbers are against the Infected. The Malfunctions are a lot harder to clear on the even side. The odd deck tops out at 8 for odd counts and 10(!) for the even deck. It's not as good with three or four. You can have a good time with four if you do some of the optional rules like removing all of the non malfunction cards from the task deck. The problem is that with lower player counts, if the infected reveals before the good guys are straight up ruined, it becomes real easy for them to stabilize. Without having trust issues, the good guys can just issue commands willy nilly and overwhelm the one infected.
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Jul 20, 2015 23:40
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Been in a move and wife and I have been through some changes at work so brain has been melty and haven't played much recently. Did get to play Istanbul recently. After one 2p play, I'm indifferent so far. For a midweight game, it falls a little bit in no-man's-land for us. In general it feels like I'd rather play something simpler and quicker or meatier and more complex. I'll have to play it some more and see if it gets better as we get more competitive. This game, I just kind of stumbled on my 6th ruby and there wasn't much my wife could do and it was pretty telegraphed. Been playing a lot of Lost Cities, actually, just because we've been wrecked and only had a little table set up for a big part of the move. It's pretty simple but surprisingly addictive and suitable for this particular mood. I'm curious about the other Kosmos 2 player games now. Looks like Fields of Arle is available again at the big online retailers, btw. I'm kind of tempted because I have a feeling my wife and some family would really dig it but I'm not sure if I want to play yet another worker placement. edit: What's the pro-est Carcassonne out there right now? Big box, Hunters and Gatherers, the City, the Castle..? Some other game? fozzy fosbourne fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jul 20, 2015 |
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Jul 20, 2015 23:44
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Cacao is supposed to be similar to Carcassone. I introduced Lost Cities to a friend a few years ago, and he's now tracked over 4,000 plays of it. It can indeed be addicting .
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Jul 21, 2015 00:17
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fozzy fosbourne posted:
I bought Hunters & Gatherers on a whim, and I like the rules a lot. I miss the awesome castle and fields theme, but the new rules make the game a ton better / more balanced.
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Jul 21, 2015 00:44
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